And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man - that is, they exchanged the one for the other. The expression is taken from Psalms 106:20, (and in the words of the Septuagint) They exchanged God for man-the incorruptible for the corruptible; nay, Him who is the essence and fountain of all that is glorious, for a mere inanimate image, fashioned after the likeness of perishable man. The allusion here is doubtless to the Greek worship, and the apostle may have had in his eye those exquisite chisellings of the human form which lay so profusely beneath and around him as he stood on Mars' hill, and "beheld their devotions," or 'the objects of their worship' (see the note at Acts 17:29). But, as if that had not been a deep enough degradation of the living God, there was found 'a lower deep' still.
And to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things - referring now to the Egyptian and Oriental worship. In the face of these plain declarations of the descent of man's religious belief from loftier to ever lower and more debasing conceptions of the Supreme Being, there are expositors of this very Epistle (as Reiche and Jowett) who, believing neither in any Fall from primeval innocence, nor in the noble traces of that innocence which lingered even after the fall, and were only by degrees obliterated by willful violence to the dictates of conscience, maintain that man's religious history has been all along a struggle to rise, from the lowest forms of nature-worship, suited to the childhood of our race, into that which is more rational and spiritual.
The retributive punishment